“Attention American workers, your plant has been taken over by an all-star team of freelance terrorists.” – Not Hans Gruber “Not on my shift! . . . Simpson 10, Terrorists 8.” – Homer Simpson

This week we’ve got three links to fan made pop culture crossovers, two of them are small (one for Lord of the Rings and one for My Little Pony), and one is marvelously epic. Unlike a recent episode or two I could mention, all three are fine examples of putting Simpsons characters into other fictional universes. There’s also a great, but most likely short lived, Itchy & Scratchy YouTube, plenty of usage, Canadian municipal politics, and a couple of skateboards.

It’s forty-eight minutes long (Zombie Simpsons start around 25:00 or so), and was uploaded by a random YouTuber, so watch it while you can because the fun police will be after it before too long.

Truly Bad Simpsons Episode Titles – Inspired by the multi-layered stupid of “How I Wet Your Mother”, Lenny breaks down some truly awful episode titles, including the ones where Zombie Simpsons uses the same pun over and over. The movie titles of Claudia-R’s posters are vastly superior to these.

Maya’s Homer Simpson donut – An amazing embroidered pink frosting donut. She even stitched it so you can see where the frosting ran. Bravo.

My Precious – I sort of feel like I’ve seen this before, but who cares? It’s Homer as Gollum and it is awesome.

Over the years Clausen has a few songs that he wrote that he considers favorites. One is “We Do” (The Stonecutters Song), which is a song sung by the members of a secret society that Homer joins.

Back in Jamestown, Clausen was in DeMolay, which is modeled after Free Masonry. He drew some inspiration from his past when he wrote it, he said.

“Homer is being accepted into this secret society in Springfield which he doesn’t know if he wants to do, because he doesn’t know if he respects an organization that will have him as a member,” Clausen said, laughing.

Clausen also cites the Senor Burns song from “Who Shot Mr. Burns, Part 2” and working with Bono for the garbage man song in “Trash of the Titans” as personal favorites. I’m sure he could come up with something more recent if he were pressed, but, as usual, anytime people on the show talk about their favorites, things naturally gravitate to single digit seasons.

Sure, Super Mario 3D Land has a nice, healthy number of levels. But playing it, we’re reminded of that time on The Simpsons when Barney was worried about the beer supply: “After this case, and the other case, there’s only one case left!”

Fear of braces? – This is a self serving article from a site called “Dentistry IQ” about how you really shouldn’t be afraid of braces, but it does get its quotes right:

In a celebrated early episode of "The Simpsons," precocious middle child Lisa finds out that she needs braces. Providing her care is Dr. Wolfe, a sinister and vaguely sadistic man who plans to imprison Lisa’s jaws within a torturous looking piece of headgear because the Simpson family can’t aîord anything better.

"Lisa, so you won’t be scared, I’ll show you some of the tools I’ll be using," Wolfe tells her just before the procedure. "This is the scraper. This is the poker. And this happy little fellow is the gouger. Now the first thing I’ll be doing is chiseling some teeth out of your jawbone. Hold still while I gas you."

But Stevie, ever the devoted friend, holds his ground (despite looking like a spurned lover at times), gives Kenny a riveting speech starting with my favorite line of the night “I didn’t just come to Myrtle Beach to party and possibly cheat on my wife” and tells him that he is his inspiration. Stevie believes that Kenny is his God and no matter how lousy Kenny treats Stevie, he is, as Lisa Simpson would say, “there to hurl whiskey bottles at when he’s feeling low” and that’s the real emotional spine of the show.

Lisa actually says “Milhouse is still going to need a true friend, someone to tell him he’s great, someone to rub lotion on him, someone he can hurl whisky bottles at when he’s feeling low”. That’s still close enough for excellent usage.

Lisa Simpsons, the Feminist – If women ever take over the Earth, I’m fairly confident that “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy” will be mandatory viewing. That episode deserves every piece of praise it gets, including this.

Yes, they’re fictionalizations, and yes, Laura Ingalls Wilder likely paints those relationships through a rather rosy filter, but still I envy them.

Not only were my husband and I raised after the invention of sarcasm, as part of the tail-end of Generation X we came of age during a time steeped in sarcasm. I think about the Simpsons scene where the GenXers are at the Hullabalooza music festival and the one guy says, “Oh, here comes that cannonball guy. He’s cool.”

8:00 – The Simpsons (Fox): Mr. Burns replaces all of his employees with robots—with one exception: Homer. This raises the unemployment rate in Springfield significantly, and leads to much misery. And it hits home to Homer, too, when robots attack him. My main comment after last night’s episode was “They know this isn’t a sci-fi/fantasy show, right?” Asked and answered.

On the flip side, let’s say you want to communicate a thought trailing off. (from The Simpsons)

KIRK: “But, will they just find Milhouse, or will they find him and kill him?” CHIEF WIGGUM: “Well, they’ll, when they find him they’ll um…“ KIRK: “Um, excuse me, you didn’t answer me, you just trailed off.” CHIEF WIGGUM: “Yeah… yeah, I did kind of trail off there, didn’t I?”

Given that there are now several years’ worth of college graduates who’ve never lived in a world without The Simpsons, it’s natural that the show would have started to seem somewhat careworn over the past year, or the past few years, or the past decade and a half. Bob’s, on the other hand, has a similar premise — it also revolves around a working-class family with three kids — but since it’s still so early in its run, Bob’s has so much fresh ground to cover. Not only that: Bob’s can also explore subjects and territory that The Simpsons has long since exhausted or abandoned: In fact, some of the Five Things Bob’s Burgers Does Better Than The Simpsons are actually Things Bob’s Burgers Does That The Simpsons Doesn’t Do Anymore, But Probably Should.

Among the things she mentions: the kids acting like kids, the family still being poor, and the celebrities not playing themselves. Amen, sister. Amen.

A perfect example of how the show never intended for Homer to be an expert at everything, or in fact anything. Even in his own fantasy he imagines the terrorists taking out 8 people. Nowadays there’s no such admission that Homer is incompetent at pretty much everything. Jump on stage and join Cheech; start a talk show and become the go-to guy for the Republican party. Back in season 6, they wouldn’t even let Homer have a ton of glory in his own fantasy.

I miss the craptacular life Homer used to live. Even when he went to space, it wasn’t because he was suddenly good at being an astronaut — he almost killed the crew & upon his return was upstaged by an inanimate carbon rod. The comments on this site about Homer “smiling too much” in recent episodes are dead-on.

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